Darko Suvin’s book on cognitive estrangement was a pioneer in ‘lifting’ the study of sf in literary circles (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 1979). It remains widely referenced and serves as an excellent starting place for gaining a sense of the history of the study of sf and contextualizing what people are talking about today.
That said, most scholars critique the logic of the argument whilst attempting to respect the goals of the essay. Personally, I think the concept of cognitive estrangement should perhaps be set aside, as it’s utility seems highly suspect even in the face of the nobility of the goal. From what I’ve read of people pulling apart the logic and trying to put it back together again, it seems a journey where real results (beyond pointing out the fallacies in Suvin’s piece) are minor, given the tangles of separating out how SF estrangement is particularly different, given that every world in a text is constructed.
And then I read Simon Spiegel’s “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of “Estrangement” in Science Fiction Theory” (Science Fiction Studies Nov 2008). He explores the theoretical background Suvin drew upon in constructing his argument before coming up with a useful taxonomy of estrangement/familiarization and applying it to film.
Suvin drew from Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and German author Bertolt Brecht in his development of “cognitive estrangement” towards showing how awesome sf is. Spiegel runs through the two theoreticians Suvin draws on, and how he at times misreads them. Shklovsky looks at how art functions to make the familiar strange in order for audiences to see it anew, at the local level of a piece’s individual stylistic choices, at the level of the perception process, and at the historical level of style shifts and canonizations across time. Brecht’s term primarily describes Brecht’s own artistic philosophy, whereby empathy is blocked, audiences are denied access to viewing the art as natural as part of a didactic/political impetus of the artist. As Booker notes “in contrast to Shklovsky, Brecht’s Verfremdung is not so much a general principle of art as a specific didactic effect” (qtd in Spiegel, 370). Spiegel goes on to point out that the goals of each artist are different in terms of reader response (one, art as eternal, the other, art as historical), but that both “see and use estrangement mainly as a stylistic device that describes how fiction is being communicated” (370).
Spiegel then points out that whilst Suvin is drawing on these traditions, he is not drawing on them in their own terms, of thinking of estrangement as a stylistic device, but rather appropriating the term to describe a genre. Every reader of Suvin’s work is quick to notice what Russian Formalists realized at the turn of the century: every text can use estranging effects, and no text is real, however realistic it seeks to be. Suvin sets up a false opposition between estranged and naturalist fiction in his use of estrangement. As Spiegel says, “The formal framework of sf is not estrangement, but exactly its opposite, naturalization. On a formal level, sf does not estrange the familiar, but rather makes the strange familiar” (372). Suvin fails in his attempt to fuse formal elements of estrangement with the ontology of the fictional world. Estrangement is a consequence of stylistic and formal choices, not from a genric pattern of creating plausible-yet-not-real worlds.
But the term ‘cognition’ is meant to mind the gap because it tries to denote an empirical plausibility. Many scholars have attacked Suvin’s logic about how, exactly, this empirical plausibility comes into existence. It seems the argument can be boiled down to, “I know it when I see it,” and “here is my opportunity to throw out anything I don’t want to count as SF by wielding the magic of a scientific term.” Spiegel points this out, but does not do much with it, a point I will return to later.
First, I want to summarize Spiegel’s concise, systematic taxonomic breakdown and updating of Suvin’s work on estrangement:
- The nature of the fictional world, first in terms of its relationship to our empirical reality, and then
- deriving from that, the genre of the respective film/text; then, further
- a formal process justifying the novum, the naturalization of the marvelous, and
- the opposite process: making the familiar strange, and
- an analogous process on the fictional level, making things strange on the level of the story, while
- both processes serve the same goal, which is the de-automatization of perception, the seeing of the familar anew.
Spiegel’s updates:
- throw out the idea of estranged genres
- naturalization: the process of normalizing the alien (i.e. presenting an unreal world as normal)
- defamiliarization: the formal-rhetorical act of making the familiar strange (i.e. how an sf story points to something in the contemporary moment in a way that makes us re-see it)
- diegetic estrangement: estrangement on the level of the story
- estrangement: the effect of the story on the audience
- “Consequently, in sf, estrangement can be achieved in two ways, by means of defamiliarization or by diegetic estrangment”
Here, finally, we have a systematic, useful breakdown of the relationship between estrangment and sf. We have a useful process to apply to sf narratives to understand their formal and stylistic elements. I recommend reading Spiegel’s application of the taxonomy to a nice range of sf movies.
What goes on in these maps of social hell? 